


Cracked Diamonds

by optimouse



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Domestic Violence, Multi, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-22
Updated: 2011-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-22 22:59:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/optimouse/pseuds/optimouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma Frost learned at her mother’s knee that if a woman wanted to get anywhere, she was the only person with the power to make that happen. Telepathy was quite helpful to those aims, including the manipulation of men. Cleavage or cortex, both helped her make her own way, often by changing the thoughts of others. She wanted to rule the world, but it is a man’s world. By playing with the minds of everyone, she thought she would take over the world. <br/>	Charles Xavier disagreed.<br/>An AU-verse in which Xavier and Magneto are tempered by a diamond’s views of supremacy, and not a Mengele’s, even if they didn’t quite figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracked Diamonds

Title: Cracked Diamonds

Rating: M

Warnings: Graphic Sexual abuse of a minor, rape, domestic violence, implied violence, implied m/m sexual relations, and death.

Summary:

Emma Frost learned at her mother’s knee that if a woman wanted to get anywhere, she was the only person with the power to make that happen. Telepathy was quite helpful to those aims, including the manipulation of men. Cleavage or cortex, both helped her make her own way, often by changing the thoughts of others. She wanted to rule the world, but it is a man’s world. By playing with the minds of everyone, she thought she would take over the world.

            Charles Xavier disagreed.

An AU-verse in which Xavier and Magneto are tempered by a diamond’s views of supremacy, and not a Mengele’s, even if they didn’t quite figure it out.

I.

“ The place between rage and serenity.” Charles had said the words to Erik, but he had learned them in his own time, in his own place. This act of tempering another’s powers was something he would have greatly appreciated having done to and with him.

It hadn’t begun when he was five, or seven, or twelve. Charles couldn’t truly remember a time before there were voices not his own in his head.

It was something he never let slip. His mother had not made him hot chocolate, not sat with him while the cook brought him hot chocolate, and his father, well, Sean Xavier had died, and his mother had married that man.

It was true his mother had never set foot in a kitchen in her life, but her feet had walked into many bars after her husband had died, far more than the dangerous amount of drinking that she’d done prior to his death, or at least it had seemed so to him.

And Kurt Marko and his son Cain had joined their lives as more than acquaintances. Mother had become Mrs. Marko, and moved them from the United States’ and Grandmother’s estate to Great Britain and a shared house with Kurt Marko and Cain.

He had appeared to be of an age with Raven when he met her in the kitchen at his Grandmother’s estate, but Charles hadn’t been ten in nearly four years, with  his growth stunted by England. The house in London that had burned in the Blitz had not ended his years or ended his stepfather’s and his mother’s presence in his life. Grandmother Xavier had sent Cain to his maternal relatives shortly after, her eyes full of regrets and her arms cradling him against her.

The comments about privilege, those had smarted. Charles found protection in the shields that had been hard-learned; never truly shields but instead whirlwinds, mist to soften rather than block thoughts.

He had rarely lived in Silence, and feared it now, a fear bred from his understanding of silence. The silence in his mother’s mind, words and thoughts smothered by liquid, his father’s vibrant mind shorting out and crying out as he died in a rage of silence.

The fact that silence had crept through his mind in the wake of his stepfather’s tests of electricity had truly scared him. Oh, he had not watched his mother die in the hands of the Nazis, but listening to her mind gurgle for air as the alcohol poisoned her? Well, at least Erik had no doubt that his mother loved him.

Charles’ mind had confirmed his intuition as he grew up, that he was but the heir of his father to Mother, to her new husband. His money funded their violence, their hatred of him. Bruises of body were only an echo of the disregard and violation the Markos had for him.

Silence was now chased by the children’s laughter, but seeing the effects of his stepfather on his home had struck at the foundations of his strength. The ashes of the laboratory were a grim reminder of Kurt, and the trouble that he had once had with control, then, and the screams of the mind as it was consumed by the silence of death. Weakened foundations of his inner pillars, that contained sense of self that allowed him to function as an individual blossomed into easily triggered memories here in the home that he had grown up in.

Both his memories and those in the house were disturbed by the changes. The laboratory had been emptied by workers years ago, and it was now Hank’s domain. The bunker in which Kurt’s electrical experiments had gone so horribly wrong that once was now where he and Erik worked with Alex on his control.

He could feel Alex’s nightmares from where he sat in bed, the table at the foot containing a chess set. It had been his grandfather’s, and his grandfather had inherited it from his father. The Xavier’s had emigrated from France in the years preceding declaration, and the chess piece had been the token of gratitude from _Le Roi_ to _un subjet loyale_.

It had become the symbol of his family, the Xaviers’ as warrior-princes, the world bending to their whim with mercy as their tool. He remembered sitting on his father’s knee, across from his grandfather, whose stately appearance had perhaps crept into his own self-image.

“Charles, the trick is not in being _honourable_ , it is in always keeping your word. Following through on what you say, Charles, is more important than wisdom, and it will teach you wisdom in itself.” Those words had echoed through his mind for years, never far from him.

His father’s work as a dilettante inventor-chemist was merely an echo of _Grand-pere_ ’s might. The money that Father had made helped replenish the stocks lost in the twenties, but _Grand-pere_ had the might of the Civil War in his words, and a seat at the Senate in his hands. The man had died in the forties, just over a century of life in his memories, and his widow had held his legacy for him.

Their strength, that he could remember.

 “What a hardship it must have been,” that was what Erik had thought of his life. Oh, but Erik knew of _personal_ hardships.  Erik knew naught of the hardship of many. He did not understand that the stunt that he had pulled on the beach, that would explode in their face. Charles had learned that the show of force made the enemy regroup, reform, and renew hatred. Silence had kept him from reminding Erik of this, reminding Erik of the impending backlash of the government. Cuba could have killed them all, not just Shaw, and not just the end of a relationship.

Oh, it would be a hardship, Charles knew this with the inevitability of someone who had met violence with violence in the past.  Violence begat violence, as he had seen in Korea, with Mossad, even in resistance to his stepfather. Oh, Erik found violence as an answer from his subjugation and torture, but Charles knew that he himself was appalled by it, perhaps too much of it interacting within his brain when he was young. Anger itself made him think longingly of silence within his own brain, that silence that repelled and awed him.

Death brought silence in so many different forms, death of mind, of self, of soul, of body. That silence that the helmet created, it was an abomination, and Charles rather thought that he would always hate it.

II.

Korea and his _brother_ were as entwined as the legs of a whore around his hips. The memories would push at the edge of his mind, interrupting, terrorizing, arousing.

 _Little Charles with his reddened eyes and reddened mouth, face distended as he came down the stairs into the lab behind Father, eyes desperate on his as he descends. Poor little Charles, so **pretty** with the mouth and the voice that begs like one of Father’s girl-whores._

 _Oh, but the boy begs, begs, begs Father. “Let go, please.” “No more, please, Stepfather, I won’t be wrong anymore.” But the boy speaks of things that have only been murmured in thoughts and Father rewards the boy’s loose mouth with needles, knives, electricity, and above all violation._

 _“Good morning, Cain!” Father’s rumbling laughter is echoing in the words, his trousers only open, and Charles is on his knees between Father’s legs, one of Father’s hands in his hair with a grip that drips pain and crimson. He can feel the smile stretching his face; Father has never thought him a victim like this, and with Charles around him, Father won’t greet him with a fist. Maybe even today, Father will be pleasant. “Would you like the boy?” He hadn’t even realized that he was hardening in his pants, and softens it with a thought, eyes locked on Charles’ face, covered in water, and swollen with Father, lack of oxygen. For a moment, he wishes that his stepmother would come into the room for a moment, notice them, but then Father is pulling out, spraying onto Charles’ face with a spurt and shake. Father is wiping himself off, in Charles’ hair, and buttoning himself with one hand and using his other fist to send Charles sprawling to the floor, blood leaking from his nose._

Oh, the whore screamed, his hips rocking into her as he pushed, feeling himself pushing forward and forward, moving the bed forward with millimeters, barely able to pull himself. She is soft around him, any delusions of tightness lost to other customers and his own continuing thrusts, but she remains wet and warm, congealing against his groin. The pleasure was starting to slither away into animal madness and memories, and Cain knew that this wouldn’t end well for her. Premonition or foretelling, he couldn’t seem to end this, trapped in memory and physical trance.

 _Charles with his eyes squeezed shut. Stepmother was outside the cabin, a heavy crystal glass in her hand. They were high in the mountains, Father’s work friends had invited them on some hunting trip, and Father had felt obliged to display them, his perfect little family with his man of a son, and his brain of a son, and the woman who made it all possible._

 _The family was cracked, as cracked as the ice in Stepmother Sharon’s highball, the man behind the bar’s eyes glinting with distaste as Charles’ had left her left hand and the absent minded petting that she had bestowed upon his hair. Sharon had not said a word, only swirling the swizzle stick in her glass, and Charles had stood, trotting across the room in the pressed shirt and trousers that the maid had set out this morning for them, a larger set adorning him, standing at his Father’s side and listening to the hunting stories of his Father’s friends, their children._

 _“I’m surprised that your Father lets your mother dress your sister up like that,” one of the other boys smirks, an elbow hammering into a bruised rib with a jolly grin meant to be naught but a love tap. “she’s such a pretty little thing.”_

 _The man at the bar has eyes on Charles, who has a tinge of blue along the hairline and big, round eyes staring back at him and begging in his mouth. Cain knows that Charles is avoiding the pinch, Sharon’s dry glass earns whatever body is closest to her the meeting of her fingers through skin, lots of skin and a bit of muscle, and it is always more expedient to leave. There’s only a moment left of liquor in her glass, and he watches it go down the throat collared with the emeralds bought for her by his Father with Charles’ money._

 _Anger flashes through him, rage. The money that the brat knows of, is killed for, the mind that Father is enthralled with, and keeps in close thrall to his own with violence and violation of the mind, of the body.  “Her name is Charles, Matthew.” Cain states, and watches the boy pale. He takes a stab in the dark at the rest of the man’s thoughts. “He is also pre-pubescent.” The boy thought his little step-brother beautiful, didn’t he, like Father did. The man in the body of a child, Cain could see deflation underneath black pressed trousers, from an inflation he could understand._

 “Stop, please, please!” The whore is shouting, and her hands are struggling against where he used his belt to lash them to the bed frame, and he can feel the pudding surrounding him, ground meat against himself.

 _Charles stood next to him, watching Stepmother Sharon dance with Father, Father’s hand whitening around Sharon’s waist, laced into a tight dress that barely bothered them anymore, a dress that Father and the men in the room enjoyed._

 _“Cain, why does Father hurt us?” They are standing in the shadow of the cabin, and he feels his hand curl into a fist, cuff the brat in the ribs. Air huffs out in a pained hiss, and Charles’ yelps with unhealthy, with hurt. Vindication races through his veins, something that he still can do, that the boy cannot match with him on this._

 _“Because of you!” Not true, not true, and the boy’s eyes are staring at him. “Because you are not his son, and your mother is a drunk,” and because Father is violent, Mother left because of a shattered arm and a softly swelling belly. She had whispered love in his ears, and **she loved you, Cain, and I love you.**_ _And there are words in his mind again, words that aren’t his, and Charles’ eyes are wide, wincing away from the tight grip on his shoulder. “Charles, be careful with that!”_

 _No need for Father to realize that Charles is more than brilliant, none at all. It would not end well._

The whore is coughing up blood now, as he pulls himself from her, thinking of a reddened mouth and a memory of a smile, and he watches her.

He’s Juggernaut, when he worked for the government, Juggernaut in a dingy motel room with the lights of an unhappy city bleeding through the window, unable to control himself even in bed. She’s whimpering, “Cain, Cain,” on the bed, and they are both sad-eyed, staring into each other as she bleeds and he deflates, going for a washcloth in this dim room in a dim town.

III.

            The manor was quiet, and the quiet worried Hank most of all of the changes. The endlessly renewing music had always reminded him that the Professor was hard at work, wherever he happened to be working that day. If it was dinner in the kitchen, the Professor was listening to a British band on the record player that had made Lensherr turn up his nose. Excessive spending, it had been written across the man’s face. When Hank had walked into the kitchen and found the Professor dancing with Raven, her feet blue and curling around his, he almost understood. Music had played from the Professor’s study, the soothing strains of Bach accompanying the man working at another paper that might never be published. In defying the CIA, Xavier had perhaps disturbed his worth to the academic community, or rather, changed his status from loyal American to potential-Communist, black listed.

            He was standing in the hallway outside the library, next to the office that the Professor called his own. Hank could barely hear the strains of music through the door, a distinct difference from the booming music that the Professor almost seemed to prefer, and the photographs, no longer shaking in the sound waves were noticeable for themselves.

            A young brunette boy, the Professor from the apparent age of the photo, was dressed in a full suit, vest visible underneath the jacket, shoulders held tightly by a taller boy, of darker features. Both looked uncomfortable, the adults next to them dressed in dinner finery. The woman’s dress was cut to fit her, and the man’s suit was equally well made, but neither looked happy with each other, with her jewelry large, and his cane an interesting lion trying to set off sparks against a personality that was no longer there. It was not something that Hank would think an Xavier to hold.

“ _The reason, Hank, that the man in that photo is holding a lion-headed cane and not the Kingspiece Cane that men in my family use is that he is my Stepfather, Kurt Marko.”_ The professor spoke into his head, and Hank looked back to the shadowing on the faces of the two boys in the photo, the drawn face of the woman, once beautiful. “Don’t linger in the hallway, Hank. You had a question for me?”

Hank stepped through the door, noticing that the professor sat in the short sofa under the window, a window that had a view of the patio underneath the second story. It was an odd choice of office, the second story room with the library stretching from the first floor to the attic, but perhaps understandable. The half-floors of the library were accessible by ladder and a small pulley-activated lift, a lift that could move the wheelchair that sat abandoned a few feet from the sofa.

He wondered for a second whether, if he lifted the quilt that the Professor had pulled over his legs, and drew up the legs of his pants and sleeves of his shirt, the Professor would have bruises speckling his arms and legs. The practice that the Professor placed into independence was left unobserved, and to his understanding was rarely an east road even assisted

“Hank?” The Professor’s eyebrows were lifted, the already thinning hair curling over his forehead. It had started migrating onto the professor’s hairbrush after Lensherr left, “Hank?” Hank pulled back, silenced his growling. He thought the stress, perhaps, was the reason.

“My apologies, professor. We have received a few calls. After you moved us here, you remember that you had called several of those that you and Erik had no success in convincing to join the CIA’s venture, and gave this address as a haven in case of need?” It was a rhetorical question. The Professor had once confided that his telepathy was accompanied with an uncanny memory, a memory that he viewed as a curse. “Well, in the last few weeks,”

“The riots in Detroit, Nashville, and Dallas, Hank.” The professor’s blue eyes were snapping. “The children are afraid, aren’t they?” Memory or telepathy, the synapses fired in a brain that was in no way damaged by his loss of walking.

“Their parents are terrified for them, especially after Cecelie D’Amidou.” The young mutant girl had been barely fifteen, her power that had thus far blossomed only that her skin would burnish itself in a golden sheen. She had been beaten, violated, and then skinned, left for dead on her doting mother’s front porch. “They want to ask what exactly we can do to protect their children, Professor.”

“Call me Charles, Hank.” The simmering anger had infected the room. The book that had been in the professor’s hands had been closed, left in his lap. “I want everyone in the kitchen for dinner tonight.” A sigh, mild disappointment littering the air. “I cannot cook on our current appliances, I would not trust Sean or Alex near a stove.” The annoyance was a welcome change from the Professor’s mild depression, and Hank felt himself smiling inadvertently. “I’ll have Alex take the car and some money, head into town. There’s a pub there, the Lucky Lantern.” The Professor had tilted his head, and Hank heard it again. “ _Alex, I would like you to take forty dollars out of the petty cash in the kitchen, and take the car into Westchester. There’s a pub called the Lucky Lantern, and the man behind today will be named Rory. Tell Rory that you are up at the big House, and that I’d like enough to feed four young men of whatever tonight’s house special is.”_

 _“Professor?”_ Hank got the impression that the Professor was consciously allowing him to hear the whole conversation. _“Are you going to need anything else from town?”_

 _“Not from town, but if Rory asks about me,”_ the Professor paused, and the blue eyes had averted to watch the satellite. _“tell him that his mother was right. And see if his sister is interested in making some money. Tell him that the Big House is looking for someone of the ability to stay as discreet as the McCrays have been.”_

“The McCrays?” Hank questioned the Professor, who had a slight smile hovering at the edge of his lips, having felt Alex’s acquiescence.

“The McCrays were always around when I was a child.” Charles was smiling at him. “Rory, his sister, and I shared tutors when I was small. His mother was our housekeeper, and his father kept the Lucky Lantern.” Charles swallowed for a second, a gulping grab of air past a knot in his throat. “I cannot believe that I barely remembered that. Mrs. McCray warned Mother and I that her marrying Mr. Marko, my stepfather, would be a change in our lives, one that might be damaging rather than the salvation that mother thought it would be.” It was a choked sob that made Hank hug at the Professor, feet having gobbled up the soft carpet in seconds. “It got her fired, but she was right.” The sadness was momentarily infectious, an angry face reddened in ire, chased away with mental apologies. “Hank, could you help me to my wheelchair? We need to go over who called, so that I can call them back after we all talk during dinner.”

Erik, no, no, he had to call himself Magneto now, even if it wasn’t the name he was born to, or the name that he chose to use himself. It was a name, a label given to him by the children, one that he could use on others to create fear. It was a name that he left on the letters that were mailed to every Federal Office building in the wake of Cecelie D’Amidou’s death. Magneto was a signature, a written promise.

 _First they came for the communists,  
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist._

 _Then they came for the trade unionists,  
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist._

 _Then they came for the Jews,  
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew._

 _Then they came for me  
and there was no one left to speak out for me._

 _\--Pastor Martin Niemoller_

If he didn’t protest, he knew, then who would? Charles hadn’t been heard from in weeks, maybe months, and Mystique’s world was wrapped up around Cecelie D’Amidou, the Cause, almost enough that she forgot her brother.

Cecelie was only a girl, barely old enough to buckle on a brassiere, and no one protested. Mutants were running scared, the deaths of three young men in an armed robbery: armed with the spikes that one shot out of his hands, the explosions that trailed out of another’s foot when he stomped, and a third all wicked eyes and a grin that promised worse. Diamante shining teeth, sharpened enough to tear at flesh. He had died riddled with bullets, a police officer’s gun gleaming in the bank window, a teller’s wrist in his hands.

Arturo Ramirez, Estallido. Carlos Alvares, Lanza. Silvio Santos, Leon. Leon’s body displayed to the crowds, Estallido and Lanza not even given the right to trial, instead strung up on a tree by the court house, feet dangling in the wind, carcasses degrading in the wind.

Emma called it a sad fate, and smirked with her eyes. He worried less about Charles speaking into his mind, then Emma sneaking. Emma’s worth to him was as much as his gut allowed him, and not his sense of logic. Any sense of fairness that he had was being used to hide his distrust from her as she danced along the edge of his senses and kept on _almost_ triggering memories.

 White was whitewash, bleaching over and over until something was hidden from view and cloaked in a veil of falsehoods. “We should find ourselves more muscle.” Those were her words to him, across the table now.

“Who would you find most appropriate?” He had several of the lists of mutants memorized, lists that he and Charles had put together from Charles’ use of Cerebro, from careful surveillance, from his own skills honed with Mossad and hunting on his own. “I’m sure that we each have our own lists.”

“The Hellfire Club was not just Shaw’s pursuit of a mutant domination of the world.” Emma spoke softly. “The first woman to hold a seat at a Hellfire Table was Elaine Snow, at the table in New York. She took the seat once held by Francis Xavier, Senator, businessman, Civil War veteran, and equal rights proponent.”

“You bring this up for a reason?” It was an interesting name, he thought, reminding him of her at the same time that the rest of her sentence hammered him in the heart. Francis Xavier was Charles’ grandfather, the man that Charles had said had ‘painted me into the man I have become, trying to teach me about balance between the ability to do something and the need to do it to affect your own ends.’ It had been a startling conversation with pacifism as understood by a man with the power to enforce it.

“Francis Xavier’s grandson Charles will be approached to sit at a Hellfire Table.” Emma’s eyes were boring into his. “With Sebastian’s death, his seat at a Hellfire Table in Las Vegas remains empty. You would receive the support of the Hellfire Club, should you take that seat.”

“The Hellfire Club is not just mutants,” It is Riptide, interrupting Emma with the face of a man who expects to be scolded. “it is for those who have power, and know how to use it. Doctor Shaw held Las Vegas after failing to find a seat in Miami or in San Francisco, or even in Detroit.”

“Why Las Vegas?” He wondered. “If he wished for a society with superior mutants, inferior humans, both in reality, and society, as well as in our ideal, then why take the Hellfire Club seat?” He breathed, wondering why those words seemed so familiar for a moment.

“Las Vegas is the home of more criminals than businessmen, and we hold power there more easily, with violence as our tool.” Emma smiled, that white smile in such a body. Curves like the cabaret dancers in a body that the Nazis would have loved. She always is garbed in white, false purity today in a tailored pantsuit that he realized she must have spent money on, both for design and the fabric, embroidered brocade. “They will come to us if we hold a seat.”

“Did Herr Schmidt not use the club to attract mutants?” He asked. “It would appear to me that he was not successful in his use of the club.” Across the table, Mystique’s eyes are wide, staring with venom at Emma, her voice whipping into the conversation.

“My brother is a telepath of far greater skill than you, Miss Frost.” For a moment, Charles Xavier is sitting in the seat, Azazel on one side of him, Riptide across. The body seems only vaguely familiar to him, and she ripples so that it becomes more of what he remembers of it. “I would remind you to keep your mind out of my head. I have always known that I am never alone, but Charles built my walls, and I can feel you slithering on them.”

“As you wish.” Emma is watching him again, and he is thankful for the protection of the helmet. Her eyes are boring into him, and it worries him in two ways and weights him in a third. “But we need more man-power.” Was his head not protected by the helmet, or had Shaw an imperfect understanding of the reality of telepathy? Could she slide through his nervous system and into his brain? Charles had never mentioned anything about _how_ his mutation worked, only _what_ it worked on, that he could hear the thoughts of others, manipulate the thoughts of another. Emma’s skills, he thought, were similar, but he _did not know._

 “I was once told,” in Israel, by his trainer in Mossad. “that one who suggests that something be changed should have a suggestion as to what he or she wishes that thing be changed to. Do you have any ideas, Miss Frost?”

“I know of three mutants who turned Sebastian Shaw down.” One that she had encouraged to do so, not that Sebastian had ever realized that she had done so. “I also know of several groups of individuals who might be interested.”

“Oh, be frank!” Riptide snarls at her, wind whipping through the dinner table with distaste and irritation. “What Emma means is she knows the leaders of several mutant _gangs_! Shaw didn’t think that they had the discipline to truly follow ideals, only money.”

“Then we give them money!” Emma snarls back, and Erik, Magneto feels an alien echo of agreement with her.

“Where do we go for the first three, Miss Frost?” Azazel is shaking his head at this.

“There is a mutant called Juggernaut in Manhattan. Once he starts to move, he is unstoppable.”

“Save for the bitch sending a hammer through his skull.” Azazel speaks, his tail whipping in the air. “That’s why he refused. Shaw tried to have her _convince_ him, and it didn’t work.

“His name is Cain Marko.” Emma continued speaking. “He will follow us.”

“Magneto.” Raven spoke, blue skin shimmering and sliding. “ I was thirteen the first time that my brother told me to be wary of things that came too easily.”

“Why would Charles say that?” His eyes were holding hers, amber and blue locked together.

“All communists are bad, are they not?” They were her brother’s words, his tone in her voice. “But the Russians helped liberate the death camps.” Her words were calm, and he strained towards her meaning. “If an enemy is so easy to find, to see, are we perhaps missing another enemy in the shadows?”

V.

“William.” She’s an icy maiden, each ankle laced into stiletto heels that make her legs look like they grew forever, and the skirts of her white dress are pleated and full. The bodice is fitted, and he can see the glisten of golden cleavage, almost the same shade as his wedding ring. Marcy was at home, pregnant with their first, conceived before the honeymoon and unhappy that he had asked her to leave her work at the Senate building as an aide. Oh, Elsa is gorgeous, one slender leg crossing over the other as she slid into the chair across from him. “How is your wife?”

 “Marcy is fine.” How could he think about Marcy as his lust is rising and that woman is smiling at him? “How is Sebastian?” Her husband, a prominent businessman, he had met perhaps three times total. The man had not impressed him, but then again, he had barely the chance to meet him privately. Elsa brokered her husband’s money into his little research project, one that had grown from mild funding from the Central Intelligence Agency’s curiosity about the paranormal and into it’s current physical curiosity about mutants. The government allowed him his study and Elsa’s money allowed him the new microscopes, to convince high-level scientists to work for him. It allowed him more leeway with ethics, he supposed.

“Sebastian is no longer with us.” Indeed, the ring that had shone on her finger no longer adorned it. “How is your project?”

“I’ve found ways of identifying anti-bodies in blood that make identification of mutants, dormant or active, far more easily.” He could feel the elation of his discovery stretching his mouth from side to side, and she was smiling, demure and joyful across from him. “I have successfully managed to trigger mutation as well.”

“You have?” She’s smiling at him, and one of those pale hands, manicured with such a light polish is curled around his arm. Marcy didn’t polish her nails, but she keeps them short and neat. A doctor has no business with long nails, she says, and she had earned that right. One of the first women graduates to be certified by the American Medical Association from her class, Marcy’s smile had caught him in a military hospital in Korea. Elsa’s nails are lethally long, sharp against the skin of his arm, and  barely breaking  causing drops of blood to bead along his forearm as she draws it up and hugs her fingers around his. “Congratulations, Captain Stryker.” He feels something, like the urge to tell her more, those eyes are always so friendly, and kind, and she was after all, so helpful against the communists, the _mutants_ , and what harm could come from telling her more about the experiments?

“I think that there are a greater concentration of mutants in blood type Rh, and O, both positive and negative, but it is impossible for me to get a large enough sample. I think that in a population of those outliers, you would be far more likely to find those _mutants_ ,” and Marcy would glare at him here, for spitting out the words. She doesn’t agree with him on this hatred of mutants, and he’s disciplined her for that before. He loved her, but a woman needed a strong hand, keep her in her place, especially with her education. He wondered at her family, letting her take so many classes.  Elsa knew her place, worked as her husband’s hand. “ and I think that high doses of radiation will trigger latent and dormant mutation.”

Her smile is a lot more icy, and Elsa’s manicure feels like nails through the soft tissue of his hand. William feels himself stuttering. It is as if she wants more information, far more than he has to give her, and it is tugging at him, gripping at his stomach to give that information to her.

“You think that radiation causes mutation, sir? If radiation causes mutation, then those living near nuclear power centers, for example, are far more likely to have a _dangerous mutation_ , than others?” William likes that she gets this. “Mutants could be created by the government, by the _communists_ , to be used against us? Us American patriots?”

“EXACTLY!” Other patrons in their little café are starting to look at them, his outburst, and the table shaking from where his hands clapped against the metal of the table. Their glasses jump, one of the waiters stopping by to refill the water, condensed coolness on the glass in the shadow of the trees. The leaves are turning, and Marcy is due in a month, at Thanksgiving.

“Would you like to order, Mr. Stryker?” The waiter is standing there, pressed shirt and pants, holding a notebook and a pen that will be tucked into a black apron. “Ms. Sleet?”

“What are today’s specials?” Elsa is asking, the waiter leaves with their orders, his for a glass of red wine, he actually hates the stuff, but ordering beer at this café could hurt him politically. Coffee will be for later, following the dinner, when the darkness in the sky that threatens will become night, truly. “You were saying something?”

“I agree with you that the mutation can be caused. If nothing else, what happened in Cuba, the moment our two fleets turned away from each other, that was the proof of _mutants_ being a security problem, making the world unsafe for us normal human beings.”

There comes the waiter, with his wine and her cocktail, something with grenadine, and she’s smiling. A sweet smile, which echoes her drink as a sickly pink confection, painted across such a gorgeous face.

“I think that they’ve already started, that Russia has created mutant agents, has recruited them.” His voice has lowered, and she’s leaned in towards him, her cleavage a long arc of flesh down the dress. “I know that one of the researchers in the Manhattan Project survived, and afterwards he could make any small item that he wanted in his house, come to his palm.” He snorted. “That was error. With trial and error, Elsa, they will have us, those mutants, and we will breed them. The question is, do we use them, or do they use us? And if we use them, can we stop them?”

She laughs at him, a tinkling laugh, and the diamonds around her wrist sparkle in the twilight as she draws her hand from his, cradling her chin in her hands and she continues to laugh before stumbling into speech.

“Bravo, Captain Stryker.” _Bravo._ It echoed in his ears, a headache full of spikes developing behind his eyes and poisoning the wine in his glass.

 _VI._

            It’s not the best day for this conversation, but the injury is healing, and if he checked himself out of the hospital with a nudge to the minds of the nurses, doctors, and administrators, it wasn’t because he was bored. They had told him that there was very little left to do for him, and Charles had already lost the use of his legs. Mild telekinesis was useful for that, hiding that the wound was still healing, that he needed help.

            Getting on with it would be time appropriate, Charles had made three successful phone calls, and he could hear Alex pulling into the driveway with the take out from the pub. It wasn’t that he did not trust Sean to pick up dinner; instead it was that he had not quite trusted him with his car. Moira’s leaving had meant that her company car was no longer something that they had access to, and he had let the staff take all of the household cars when he was closing up the house to leave with Raven for England.

            His Austin-Healey BN7 was only borderline legal, here in the States. He was positive that the only reason that he was allowed to keep it was that he had placed pressure on the minds of those Customs’ agents in charge of his return to the United States. The CIA’s intervention could not have hurt his cause. It had smarted, leaving the BN7 in a lean-to near the now destroyed research facility, just for the days that he was there with Erik, working with Hank and Raven. When they had gone together to find mutants, the BN7, his lady-love, was what he had brought to the front of the facility. There were agents fawning over her, and Erik had raised an eyebrow.

            “Ostentatious of you, Charles.” He could still hear the words in the air, a subtle rebuke. Charles remembered the temptation to dance through Erik’s mind and how he had only indulged himself in the wrap of Erik’s emotions around him. He could still bring that echo up, amusement tinged with disdain all flavored in Erik. Such a strong mind that Erik had, a mind that had still sung with the fingers of that steely woman, her disturbance of Erik’s mind pulling forward memories of his childhood, memories that didn’t always make sense.

            “Raven said that when I saw the car, it was as if I had fallen in love.” He had bought her on a whim, and while he could only drive her on the weekends in Oxford, she had been well kept. His stepbrother would have enjoyed her. Cain always had loved a skillfully built combustion engine. “It may be money that could be spent elsewhere, Erik, but it’s spending that I love.”

            “It hums.” Erik had a hand on the steering wheel. He had swung into the car during their conversation. “It likes you, the metal does.” Erik was the second driver, and until he had allowed Alex to take her into town to pick up dinner, the only other driver of the BN7.

            He would have preferred Hank, whose skill as a pilot was undeniable, but the car would not suffer Hank’s elongated limbs without mutual pain, and Charles would rather neither be tortured. It was something barely relevant, but as he took the lift in the library down to the first floor and out and across into the foyer, he could not let that out of his mind. He’d never drive the BN7 again.

            “The man behind the counter at the pub was friendly.” Alex was commenting to Sean, who had apparently rode shotgun in the sports car. “Can you believe what he said about the Professor?” _That he actually used to control people accidentally?_ It had seemed so out of control, and the woman that he remembered so vaguely, that fiercely ordered mind had seemed like a godsend

“He was right about that, Alexander.” He used the full name to throw Alex off kilter for a second, both of the boys turning to watch him wheel across the foyer. Sean moved away from Alex, and behind his chair, moving them both towards the kitchen. “I manifested as a passive telepath when I was very young, Alex.” He could hear Hank clattering around the kitchen, putting out places for them, making sure that both Charles and Hank would have the space to fit around the kitchen table. “That means that I could hear others’ thoughts, the surface thoughts, emotions, and that, before I was able to talk. He should remember when I began to manifest as an active telepath.”

            “Why?” Hank had turned to them when they’d entered the kitchen. “Why would the man behind the counter at the pub remember that?”

            “I manifested in terror, Hank.” Charles could remember that very well. “I _made_ my stepfather save my stepbrother and I from a laboratory fire.”

            “He wouldn’t have done it anyway?” Sean questioned, and Charles was shaking his head. Alex would understand, prison having honed what the loss of his parents and his younger brother and the following foster care had created. A boy was built of the metal, the man of the smelting and the sharpening of life.

            “No.” The fire had killed his stepfather, freed him and Cain, and Raven could never know the true meaning of the terror that he and his stepbrother had had of Curt. “Anyway, I managed to broadcast my terror all the way into town. The fire brigade had left for the mansion before the housekeeper had managed to call for aide. It meant that the laboratory burned, but the house was safe.”

            “So that’s why half of the sub-basements are marked as unsafe?” Alex asked. “Fire and water damage?”

            “Structurally they are safe.” Charles replied. “However, they will need to be cleared. That’s part of the reason that we are sitting down together tonight for dinner. I have some things to bring up.”

            “Would this have something to do with Amelie D’Amidou?” Sean asked. “I know that my parents didn’t care that I was a mutant, that I have skills, and hers didn’t, but there was another case on the news this morning.”

            “Oh?” He fought the itch to merely read it from Sean’s mind.

            “A family tried to drown their daughter.” Sean snorted. “Eight year old girl. She had gills, Professor.”

            “It was in the New York Times.” Hank poured water into each of their glasses, and the dinner is dished from each of the carryout containers onto the plates.

            “I see. I’ve received several calls from parents that Erik and I had talked to while searching for the team that we put together for the Agency.” Charles knew that these words were more important. “I’ve returned three of them, and they’ve all asked if I knew of a safe place for the children.”

            “Professor?” Hank was watching him. “Are you thinking about making this more of a haven?”

            “I was thinking about a school, Hank. A school for mutants.” He gulped in air, trying to force it down his throat through pure will. “Three students will be arriving this week. I know that we didn’t talk about it?”

            “You are inviting strangers here.” It was an unhappy Alex, staring at him. “Bad enough that Magneto knows where we are, but now there will be strangers here, in our haven.”

            “Havok.” He knew that he would have to explain the rest of it fully. “One of the children is a boy, and he can emit beams like yours, from his eyes. His mother says that he could control them until a man took him. The only reason she found him again is because her husband made a comment to her, that his boss was ‘seeing what the freak could do.’” He had heard her voice, her worry through the phone. She had been staying with her sister three states from her husband, having broken into the facility, and stolen her son from them. “I cannot in good conscience allow something like that to just happen when I can help.”

            “I agree with the Professor on this.” Hank was rumbling softly. “Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” his arms were running the length of his body in indication. “If I had come here as a teen ager, not letting the demons of my mind control my body.”

            “Alright.” Alex had concurred. “Beast’s right. Bad enough being a teenager, but a mutant like us? I remember puberty and manifestation. That wasn’t fun.”

            “What are we going to need?” Sean asked. “It’s not like the majority of the house is ready for occupation.”

            “Three new empty bedrooms, preferably close to the rest of us for now.” Charles knew the next step. “I’ll pull out the blueprints for the house, and we can start thinking about where to put people, and how. We’ll need  certification for homeschooling. I have a PhD in genetics, and a Masters in physics and medicine. Hank’s skills with engineering and mathematics, we have teachers for the hard sciences. We are going to need teachers for literature, history, and languages.”

            “I may know someone.” Hank was smiling, the white teeth almost feral in his blue face. “Her name is Diana, Diana Spencer. She has just finished her Masters program at Wellesley, and she is, I think, a bit like you.” Glasses were pushed to the bridge of his nose. “Professor,”

            “Call me Charles, everyone!” It was an attempt to lower the tension in the room.

            “We’re going to need a housekeeper, a staff. People who aren’t easy to scare. Sympathetic people.”

            “Scott’s mother is interested in coming and staying, helping.” He remembered. “Alex, Sean, would you like to handle hiring?”

 _VII._

            Cain had worked hard in the Army. It wasn’t that his step-brother had not worked hard, it was that he had never quite understood what or how Charles worked. Charles had been working with or for an Allied government, tracking criminals, and he had been in the same area as Charles for exactly fifty three hours.

That time spent in the same space was enlightening, and had started his migration from the Army and back into normal life. Someone had to help Raven with managing Charles, and while he might not be the best person to do so, he certainly didn’t mind. He was indebted to the little brat, which would be his name to him, at least for a few more years. Charles’ would always remind him of the first time that he’d met Charles, with Charles the youthful child holding tightly onto his mother’s housekeeper’s hands.

“Cain, I would like you to meet Charlie.” Father had said, and he had looked at Sharon with kind eyes, lying eyes, and he had felt it. _Why lying eyes?_ Asked with shining blue eyes watching his face. “Charlie, Cain is going to be your big brother now.” _Why Charlie? Daddy never calls me Charlie, and Mother doesn’t care._

“Come forward and give Cain a hug.” Sharon had said the words, and the housekeeper had glared at her. The little boy had come forward, and loosely wrapped his arms around him, eyes wide and frightened. He has thought for a moment that the child was correct to be frightened, especially of Father, and he had felt that questioning wave again.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He had wrapped his arms around the little boy, feeling Father’s glare on his skin. No, Charlie was his to protect.

Now, so many years later, the little brother had disappeared again. He had heard that Charlie was in Oxford with Raven, but after that, they had been inconspicuous. Charlie was so rarely inconspicuous.

“KID!” There’s a little kid, sitting in the middle of his garage. “How many times do I have to tell you not to play underneath the engines!”

“But I want to know how they work!” The Long Island drawl is in the boy’s voice, and Cain looks around for the other hooligan that the kid hangs around with. Where Davey Rossi goes, Ray Finnegan wasn’t far behind. “Dad said,”

“Your Dad said that you could come by twice a week so I could show you how to change the oil, other things like that. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 pm. Your father accompanies you and Ray with cookies that your mother has baked, or something like that lovely cake last week.” He could not cook, and while he and Charles had hidden in the kitchen a time or eight, only Charles had ever understood the cook’s lessons.

Father had fractured Charles’ jaw once, Charles having brought him a plate of cookies to try and please the man. The man had called him a sissy boy, even if the night before he’d called him his little whore. He and Raven had hugged together, frightened of the noises in Charles’ room, and the terror that was not their own, flooding their minds. “Today is not Tuesday or Thursday, and I am fairly sure it’s not 7 pm.”

“The man is right.” There’s a man in the doorway, slender and in black, what looks to be a cloak of crimson around him. Next to him is a woman, curved body, redhead, and eyes, familiar eyes. “Today is a Friday, young man, and it’s two in the afternoon.” Above the boy the car is moving, up and away from the child’s head and body. “You might want to leave.”

“Mister Marko?” Davey’s looking worriedly at him now, and Cain shakes his head. Another man like Charlie and himself and Raven, he understood, like another man in the program in which he had served just after they realized his skills. That blonde woman who had ridden his mind and body so long before, up in one of the houses in the mountains while he tried to hide himself from the damage his Father was doing to Charlie.

“Go find Ray, enjoy the weather.” It’s a rare sunny day, and the sun would have called the boy anyway. He steps backwards and down the ladder, watching the boy run out of the back of his garage. “Who are you?” He can feel the ground beneath his feet, and he’s tempted to start running, but the car is already settling down, back onto its stand. The wheels were off, and something’s now wrong with the chassis.

“My name is Magneto, and this is Mystique.” She’s melting into a far more familiar form, and he can feel her wrapping her arms around him. “I can see you’ve met in the past.”

“You need to go home.” She whispers into his ear. “Charles needs you, needs family.” She is pulling away from him, bringing the man closer to him with her other hand. “Magneto, Juggernaut. Or rather, Erik Lensherr, I would like to introduce you an old family friend. Cain Marko. Cain, Erik is looking for recruits.”

“Recruits?” He’s watching her more closely. “You want more of us with you, don’t you?”

“We do. As we are naturally superior to humans, the mutants must ascend to their rightful place, above the humans, perhaps even without the humans.” The words make him cringe, and he doesn’t want to say what he thinks, not immediately, and he looks at Raven. Raven, the sister that Charles had found in their kitchen late one night, and brought to him, showing her off. _Cain, Cain, isn’t she pretty. She’s like us!_ Those words had frightened him for a moment, another one like them, victimized by Father, ignored by Sharon. Charles’ enthusiasm had almost bled into him, and for moments his joy had shown within Cain, a warm sun burning in his chest, trying to displace the pain of the bruised ribs with love and care.

 _Raven, do you believe what he is saying?_ It slips into her mind on the paths that had grown around Charles’ constant presence in both their minds, in the years that it took him to grow his own walls. _This talk of superiority?_

 _Cain, we are superior, that is certain. Charles wishes for peaceful co-existence, but Magneto knows that peaceful co-existence comes only at the end of a war. Charles…_

 _Charles hates fighting._ Cain thinks the words, remembers the birth of them. Magneto is watching them, continuing to breath his rhetoric, rhetoric that sounds wrong out of a body that has pushed up sleeves and a tattoo that he remembers from that meeting with his brother so many years before. _I cannot find Charles, Raven.I know not the way to find him to go to him._

“No.” He says the words to the man, ignoring his sister. “I may agree with you about peaceful co-existence, Mister Lensherr, but I learned my lesson about subjugation before I could legally vote in this country.” Cain knew what the answer that he had for them now would be. “Worry first about those in the government that know about _us_ , Mister Lensherr. Then worry about subjugating others, being mutants and supreme.”

“Who do you mean, when you say that?” There’s a metal bar around his neck, and all Cain can do is raise an eyebrow. “The Central Intelligence Agency?”

“Army, Mister Lensherr. Air Force. Navy.  The military industry loves and fears us, and is certainly quite interested in mutation, for their personal ends.”

 _VIII_

She holds them in her hand, their lives, loves, and thoughts.  She owns them now, and she could resume her place at the head of their society. Men were weak, that was the thing that she had learned from her mother. Hazel had married well, and proceeded to be ruled by Winston and his violence. The family had followed her lead, but she, she had decided to be something more.

Emma’s first husband had been named Alexander Hood, and he had like to dress her in diamonds. They sparked, he had said, sparkled like her eyes. He had thought that they decorated her, his whore, so very well. He had eventually thought of her, thought and thought and thought of her.  Alexander Hood had thought enough about his wife with the silken legs and the inviting eyes so much that he put her into his will, leaving her the whole of the moneys, and not even naming his sons or grandsons. He then thought about her as he proceeded to walk into traffic, managing to get himself run over by three buggies.

She had worn white to his funeral, and Emma had continued to wear it through the next three funerals. Meeting the Xaviers had been a stroke of luck on her part.

Brian Xavier loved his wife Sharon immensely. Sharon was a lush. That was Emma’s first impression of the pair, followed by the curiosity at the woman’s burgeoning belly. It was practically cooing in her mind, all wrapped up in warmth, coddled by its father. Barely even conceived, she can feel the little bits of the baby forming together, and wonders that she can. Looking back, she nudged a bit. A tiny push to make sure that the egg was fertilized, not by one sperm, but by two. A secondary plan never hurt a woman intent on experimenting.

She’d been in and out of the child’s life, and was practically infatuated with the child’s mind. Her interference, perhaps, with his conception had created what she thought to be the child’s gifts. Meeting Francis Xavier proved her thoughts to be erroneous. Hovering around a century of age, Francis Xavier’s hair had completely fled his head years before. Rumor had it that when he had come home from the Civil War, his title of General had replaced the luxurious head of hair that he had once sported. She attributed it to a **gift** of his own, the man simply not aging like so many did, like her diamond form prevented her from doing.

He was married, to a woman, his second or third wife. She had given the Xavier patrician no children, but Niamh Xavier’s love of her family was legendary, and she had taken to Emmeline Neige with great adoration. Francis had agreed, and it was through the pair that she was introduced to the power of the Hellfire Club.

Looking back, she had abandoned her pursuits into creating a pet out of a fellow gifted human for the Hellfire club and the power inherent there. She had removed Francis’ claim on a seat quite steadily, having to resort to the indignities of poisons. Apparently those that could breed a telepath were less likely to be influenced by one, and she hadn’t wished to warn his family that his death was both imminent and at her hands.  They might get suspicious, with such a change in the man, that he would have a fatal accident. Experience taught her that men who had fatal accidents and left something of import to someone near them meant that the aforesaid heir was then annoyed. Irritated by unhappy former benefactors.

No, poison had gotten the job done satisfactorily, and she had stepped into a seat at the New York Hellfire table.

Emma had left in a hurry, several years later. The reason was immaterial.

 His name was Sebastian Shaw, his ideology was perfect. Of course mutants should rule the Earth. Her gifts made her the most superior thing on Earth. It was his vision that was problematic.

Interest in why things ticked, tocked, and continually spun the way that they did was certainly a valiant pursuit that helped the need for supremacy, but this consummation of energy, this complete obsession with it was taking away from the ability of Shaw to use the ruthlessness that he applied in service to his beliefs. It started, for him, with the seed of an idea.

 _What about seeing if I could make a mutant out of someone? Multiple someones?_

He had already realized that given the appropriate trigger, he could trigger latent mutations. Erik had proven that mutations other than his own existed, Erik, and Tanya, and Tzipporah, and other names. Leah, Avraham, and Benjamin had been three who had helped him prove that he could trigger latent mutations, and they all had proven that he could identify them once he had them. The problem was the trial and error. Were there things that made certain people more likely to become mutants, similar to the ways that certain illnesses ran in certain families?

 _Like hemophilia in the line of Queen Victoria_ , it had flashed in his brain. _Mutations in bloodlines, superior bloodlines. Perhaps the bloodlines are proof that the man is fit to rule?_ Emma had triumphed as the wording, calling back to the Aryans and their silly beliefs that they would inherit the Earth based on the merits of their past knocked on the walls of Shaw’s mind. _You’re able to use any force used against you against your enemies, use it to power yourself. You deserve to rule them._ If he had not failed she would have ruled through him, and now her plans changed. With Erik, she would have access to Charles, heir and experiment together and she might rule in truth, enemies disintegrated by Charles’ strength of mind.

Shaw was a sanctimonious idiot, who thought she looked gorgeous in a cocktail dress, and gave her pretty things. Shaw just wanted to rule the world, proof of the superiority of mutants. What would he get out of it, other than the stroking of ego?

The White Queen would rule the world.

William had already started her war for her, his anger and arrogance brewing into a stew of attack, and he would bring her Charles, even if he did not know it yet.

Emma snorted into her cocktail, the sweetness of the cherry in the grenadine sweetening this moment. William Stryker did her bidding. The thought had been Shaw’s, to research on ways of manipulating and creating mutations, on being able to track those mutated through genetics. She was the one who thought of how it could be used. If Magneto won the world, following in Shaw’s footsteps, she would be the one to bring him a way to find all those who needed protection from the rabble, the humans. If the humans, Stryker’s ilk, won, they would help eliminate her rivals.

Magneto had been speaking the night before, the others listening to him, and she could let her mind try and prod. She had found that she could sneak through the helmet, spinal cord and nerves pulling her along. Shaw had been easy, his arrogance making her job so easy. Erik was also glaring at her, as if paranoia made him know that she prodded at him.

“Emma, I thought that you had ideas on which mutants we should recruit?” He had tested her, and she had known that she would fail, not knowing what was said. Her memory was imperfect. It was why that she, in the here and now worked so hard to commit the words that William and his hatred said to her memory.

Erik Lensherr’s beliefs were in the protection of mutants from the humans, and for that, she would keep him stolen from Charles Xavier. Francis’ grandchild, her little creation was stronger than she was already, and she wondered for but a moment on that. If she could go around that helmet with Shaw underneath, did that mean that he could have gone through with time? With Erik?

“Sebastian had found a young gentleman in New York City. The young man flies, and will inherit a sizeable fortune from his rather healthy father. The man would bring funding and influence among the elite for our cause.” Warren Worthington the Third would bring her a great deal of power, and they had already met several times. Worthington Junior, his father, had thought her gorgeous and a gorgeous lay. He would be easy enough to seduce into death.

“I shouldn’t see a problem, then.” Magneto’s voice had served as a rebuke. “Emma, if you don’t care to be here, would you prefer to leave?” She had left for her trip to Washington, where Warren was on business with his father, ostensibly to scout out the man. She was really here for William.

She had extended an apology last night, a demure rejection of his thought, but hoped that Magneto is soon less than his current position at the head of their table. The man is not as pliable as she had first thought, planting the seeds of rejection in his mind, training him to disdain pacifism.

 _Is his telepathy my creation?_ She thought of Charles, retreating from the conversation again. He wasn’t normal, he wasn’t. He had dived into her mind, not bothering with persuasions, or even brute force, and his presence had tingled. _Is his telepathy stronger than mine? Certainly, but is he more skilled?_ Erik lived on her whim now, believing in her need for superiority. Well, she wanted superiority for herself.

The woman at the top of the table was the most powerful woman, and she now  sat at the hand of the man who had taken the seat that Sebastian Shaw had once created. Her work on William Stryker, his eyes mesmerized by her and mind bewitched burned new pathways for her agendas.

Wind rustled through the trees overhead, and the street outside the café was filled with cars. Emma scanned briefly. _Curiosity! Oh, this sex is horrible. What did my wife make for dinner?_ Some blank spots, but some men and women were idiots, and she had learned years before that the idiots of the world did not bear further investigation. It would only bore her.

Pressed pant legs of the waiter returned, their dinners in his hands and an apology on his lips about the length of time that it took him to deliver the salads. Apparently there was some sort of situation in the kitchen, _Mary’s sobbing into Raul’s shoulder, Lana was horrible to the girl. Woman should not be working as a hostess if she is that mean to,_ and Emma pulls away. “Your entrees should not take more than fifteen minutes,” he assures them. “And would you like your drinks to be refreshed?” No more thoughts of Erik and his obsession, they served as too much distraction from her goal.

“Yes, I would. Would you put a splash of vodka in mine as well?” It danced along the lines of being Un-American, but at times she found herself missing the cold of Russia. Besides, today she celebrated.  “William, would you like another glass of wine?”

“Yes, I would.” _Marcy would have just had them pour me another,_ William is thinking now of his wife, swollen stomach and crazy ways. He’d bruised her arm this morning.

“Do you like the salad?” It’s crisp, with a taste of something new, and again, something catches her attention out of the corner of her eye.

There, in the crowd, there’s someone watching, and she cannot tell for the moment their identity. Perhaps Cain? She would remain thankful that the man had not taken up Magneto’s offer.

He had been a mistake, the older stepbrother of the Xavier telepath, and she had taken him into her bed for a time. Unable to control him for lengthy periods of time, perhaps if he spent much time around her, he would have realized what she had done to his mind in the past, the incident that triggered him enlisting in the war.

No, it was better for her personal cause, that Marko never be around her for too long again. If he realized what she had done to him, well the man had been great fun in bed, and breaking him in had given her insight on Charles. Big, muscular, aggressive. The fun had been that she would not be able to control him if he got too angry, and she supposed, it would be best if she rarely tested it.

Unfortunately, she had a suspicion of what would happen should she test it. That kind of mental violence could be interesting, physically. Not aimed towards her, though. Diamonds would not keep her safe from the Juggernaut.

“Are you well?” The human is asked, and Emma nodded, absentmindedly. “You look, distracted.” Of course she was distracted, she thought to say.

“My apologies.” She placed her hands upon his. “I find myself much to pieces now that I no longer have Sebastian to help me, help give form to my life.” William Stryker is a fit man, and she supposes that the Army will create that of a man, no matter his original physical shape. He also thinks that women need help, and she can use that. “I try my best to continue in his footsteps, keep doing the work that he wanted me to do.”

“Mutants.” Pffah! William’s voice makes the noise of disgust and she echoes it at him. He is a tool, unable to realize that he is being used. “Your nation thanks you for your patriotism.” _Saving us all from the mutant threat, both foreign and domestic._ “Your husband’s belief in our cause was well placed. We are making such steps forward. Even the research that we’ve done on mutants, things that we’ve found that haven’t led us towards mutants have helped us more than mere science for science’s sake.”

“But we won’t be safe until your accuracy improves.” It’s quite true. He’s also found other things, more interesting things.

 _IX_

            “Three cleaned bedrooms for any new inhabitants.” Sean walked into the office, the cleaning rag still bundled in his hand. “If one of the new children is coming with his mother, won’t we need two bedrooms?”

            _Most likely not._ Charles was tempted to speak into Sean’s mind, and did it, ignoring the woman across the desk from him for a moment. _I think that we may need more rooms, it’s just that I do not want us to do any more cleaning than we need to do, right now._

 _Oh?_ Sean was staring right back at him, at the slender blond woman across the desk from Charles. Pretty face, long with an angular jaw and a gentle smile, she had eyes as blue as the Professor’s. _Who’s she?_

            “Miss Diana Spencer, I would like to introduce you to Mister Sean Cassidy, Banshee.”

            He took her hand, for a moment struck by her kind eyes and their warmth against his skin. In fact, it was more than warmth, almost as if a small light bulb was trapped between their palms, sparking between them.

            “You have the most lovely emotions.” Her statement was spoken in parallel to his.

            “What a pleasure to meet you today, Miss Spencer.” Banshee found himself awestruck.

            “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance as well.” He couldn’t think for a moment.

            “Miss Spencer is an empath, Sean, a tactile, passive empathy. She is also here to interview about taking a few classes, or rather, tutoring them.” She would look lovely, he realized, dropping her palm from his, in a teacher’s frock, perhaps she’d even… _Sean! She may not have my range, but your face is all the words she needs to realize your thoughts._ Ah well. “Miss Spencer,”

            “Call me Diana, please.” She assured, and the Professor nodded to her, eyes at the open window, and the road that snaked through its view.

            “will be joining us here several days a week to help us bring those of us behind on our literature and composition skills up to the level of those who  can and have graduated from high school.”

            “School?” Sean whined, he’d hated it before he’d joined with the Professor and Magneto, and he doubted he would like it now.

            “Yes, Sean, school.” The Professor was definitely distracted, a car chugging up the driveway to the house, Sean could see it in the man’s eyes.

 _The thought is in his mind, and that presence is familiar, as familiar as Raven, a fingertip drawing up a bruised chin with such a look in his eyes. Cain, brother, stepbrother, the one who stayed, but could not stay without the violence, did not stay to clean up the mess that they had lived through, the mess that ran through Charles’ mind every night like the ghosts of the dead._ The professor’s thoughts blew through his mind, their taste distinctive and foreign.

 _Cain?_

“Professor, is everything all right?” The professor is pale, far more pale than a man under thirty and in relatively good health has any right to be. “Is it the man in the driveway?”

The phone on the professor’s desk rings, a phone that was placed in the Foyer when they had realized that some form of communication would be needed, that the mansion itself was too large to make communication within the house easy.

 “Banshee, would you pick up the phone, and tell Cain to come upstairs?” The Professor’s skin looked almost waxy. “Tell him, the old office off of the library. Grandfather Francis’ library.”

“Professor?” He conveyed it to the deep voice on the other end, a deeper crack of a whip with the American accent on the voice, not the British. “Are you sure that you are all right?”

The three of them can hear the footsteps on the stairs up to the second floor, and the Professor is making his apologies, arranging a phone call. “Sean, would you show Miss Spencer the house? I know that you and Alex are handling hiring, would you want to go over the options that you have found so far after dinner?”

“Sure.” It’s with a worried glance that he leaves the room, brushing shoulders with the man, broad of shoulder and body, and dark of hair and eye. Little recommends the man to the memory, except the scarring on his arms and neck, probably the result of fire. Alex had similar, his body caught in the explosive creations of his mutation. “Professor, if you need anything…”

“You’ll hear him clear across town, kid.” The gruff voice ripples through his ears. “Aren’t you going to stand up and give your big brother a hug?”

The conversation between the two fades into murmurs as he and Miss Spencer, Diana, walk away.

“How did you manifest?” He asked, pulling away from their conversation. If the professor could make an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency forget where she had been for months on end, he could take care of himself, even if the man that he was facing was large and physically imposing. “Me, I was about fifteen. There was this girl in my choir class, and I was still singing soprano.” As a matter of fact, he still could sing soprano, but what he meant was that his voice hadn’t dropped yet. “ I was singing an aria, gorgeous piece, and she thought my voice was gorgeous. _Serse_ ’s, in Serse.”Diana was looking at him with an indulgent smile, and he explained. “I was a treble, and my voice cracked. And by cracked, I mean that I broke every window in the room. The choral teacher was dumbfounded, and the girl was certainly impressed.”

“Good story.” She was smiling at him. “Did you ever regain control over your voice to sing again?”

“I’m a counter-tenor now, Miss Spencer, but I’ll never sing in a hall again. My voice is beautiful, but even with the breath control that my sonic scream needs, the amount of control that not using it in a theater would need wouldn’t be worth it.” He was grinning though. “My mom wanted me to sing opera. I like singing for friends, a drunken serenade at the bar, everyone gathered around the campfire with a guitar best.” He exhaled. “So how did you manifest?”

“My family is from Nevada, near the Yucca Flats.” She remembered the time period quite well. “My father worked with the scientists out in the desert, and one day I was playing outside with friends. It was as if I was being lifted off of the ground by an ethereal wind, and pushed inside out. They never quite found what caused it, but two weeks later, I told my dad to go hug my mother and apologize, that she was crying inside.” She smiled, remembering that day. “My mother was starting to hear voices, and she was going to kill herself. She thought she was going mad.”

“She’s a telepath?”

“No, my mother is schizophrenic, but until then, she didn’t know that. Father took her to the doctor, and they prescribed pills, and she got better. Father and I sat down, and we did some experiments, and figured out what I could do.”

“How do you know Hank?”

“Hank was one of my father’s students: Father had him for undergraduate physics when we moved to the east coast so that my father could take a position at New York University. He took me to several dances while I was in high school, and escorted my father and I to several colleges when I was looking at an appropriate place to go to university.” Diana smiled, and the slightly plain face became stunning with joy. “He was so happy when he got into the graduate studies program at Columbia, and the research position with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“You know about that?” He wouldn’t think that most people would know that their friend was working for the CIA.

“My father was a government scientist, for a time, under a General Stryker, and I have a very good memory.”

 _X._

            _Cain_. The voice whispers through his mind, his synapses, like a man silencing worries. _I thought that you would never come home._

 _And I had thought that you were forever abandoning the Xavier home when you left, little brother._ Little brother was tinged with the whole of his memory. Little brother as the child that he had angrily hit when Father had been angry at him. Little brother as the child that he had tucked to his body and rocked when he had been bloodied himself by Father’s anger. _What happened to working for **government factors**_ **,** _little brother? I thought that your mind was happy as the pampered pet of some intelligence agencies._

 _Erik._ It was a name, a face. Steel bending, the glorious weight of a submarine aloft in air, a child lighting candles with his mother, sobbing as his mother’s corpse lay dead on the ground, and Cain could feel his brother’s sorrow tinged love pealing through his mind. _His name was Erik, and they came for the Jews and captured mutants as well. Stepfather was a dilettante in pain, but there was a man in the camps, Sebastian Shaw. Do you remember him?_

 _Vaguely._ The man had danced with a woman in white, her long gown classically fashioned rather than new-fangled, and she had smiled with ice picks.  Her name was something else, and he remembered her worse. _She was the woman, the woman that you hated._

 _She took my older brother from me, Cain._ Charles whispered. He barely remembered the woman, a cloud of malice and self-based pleasure seeking. He hated her for her consummation of Cain’s pleasure, offering him none of his own to enjoy. _She reminded me of Stepfather._

 _Why?_ It had been consensual, and he had enjoyed her ministrations. Changing their direction of thought was a redirection of thoughts and cares. _Sebastian Shaw?_

 _He worked on the bodies of those like us, like Mengele did. He had systems, purposed, things to learn. It was his mistake. He decided to see what he could make a mutant do, and then saw that he could make a mutant, and then made sure that he understood them thoroughly._

 _Shaw experimented, then?_ The words were harsh. There had been experiments on soldiers during Korea, during the second world wars. Experiments to see if they could make soldiers go faster, fight harder, take longer to die. His own change had been the result of an accident. Father had decided to see what lengths Charles’ would go for the protection of himself and Raven. _Did it end him?_

 _Yes_. Erik stood at the side of a beach, a corpse in his hands, the man falling to the ground as the military fired. _It did. Now they hunt us, looking for mutants to either kill or use. I feel them crawling on the edges of my range, looking for mutants to use._

 _There is a man called William Stryker._ He remembered the man, curious, always curious, and curious in a way that reminded him of a surgeon that cared not for the health of his patients, but instead only for the way that things are put together and how he could change that. _He works for the United States Army._

            _You think that he is involved?_ Charles’ was in his mind, and images of Stryker flashed through his mind, like his younger brother trying, desperately trying to understand consensual sex. That had nearly broken his heart, so many years before, and this absent minded comprehension of his mind now scared him. _Yes, I have changed as well, brother. Your mutation is gorgeous._

 _I could have protected you from Father._ In the late sunlight of the afternoon, his brother is shaking his head.

            “It would not have mattered.” It is for but a moment, and their minds are still mingled, but he realizes that he has yet to even cross the room, to hug his brother. “Come here and give me a hug?” Charles offers, and before Cain knows, he’s walking across the hardwood floor and to his brother, sitting underneath the open window. “No, I didn’t pull you over.” It was a worry thatr he had not even voiced, remembering the accidents of his brother’s youth, the small things that had happened only in times of stress, but there had been so many stressful times.

            “I had not realized that I was worried about that, Charles.” Cain can feel his boots on the hardwood floor, and he realizes that he is not quite what he should be, for the studied wealth of Grandfather Xavier’s office. It was his boot knocking against metal that made him take a closer look at his brother.

            Charles’ lap is covered with a quilt, one that he remembers from their youth. Sharon had thought duvets more appropriate for their _status_ when she was sober, but her sobriety was fleeting, and Charles had convinced the new housekeeper to air out three of the family quilts. They had been a part of the trousseau of Francis Xavier’s first wife, Charles’ great grandmother, intricate, sewn by hand, and gorgeous shades of blue and silver, also long and obscuring. “Charles, why are you in a wheelchair?”

            It hits him like a bullet. _Pain/loss/grief. Erik is leaving, and he cannot say goodbye, cannot beg him to stay. That helmet is like a bullet to the brain, killing the man in front of him, cursing him with silence. Silence, a gaping hole where his mind had once danced lightly around the thoughts, always familiar and always loved, and now gone. PAIN/Agony, the hurt of feeling another die was wrong enough, but he did not need this, that Erik is gone, gone, gone, and he can not feel him. It is worse than that. What he had thought to be a missing heart, a missing body is that, but the mortal frailty, something is missing. “I can not feel my legs.” Erik is gone, he cannot feel his heart._ Charles, Charles.

            “The bullet created a spinal cord injury, a bullet shot at Erik.” He sighed. “It is only my body, Cain.”

            “No!” The anger is his own, anger at the words that his father had created through abuse and neglect and rape. Charles’ mind was his worth. Push a cup with his mind, not receive a thumping. Get raped for being good, with coos of how brilliant he was for knowing what Father wanted. “Charles, you live in that body, no matter how much time you spend with your mind.” He breathed out, expelling the anger. “Charles, you want to protect the other mutants here, correct?”

            “I will protect them, Cain.” Cain knew that. “They deserve far more than I can give them.”

            “But what about what you deserve, little brother?” He knew that it would happen. His brother would push his own needs aside. He had done it so that Cain and Raven would have money, financial stability. He had saved them from the fire in Father’s lab with absolute control, born of terror, but control. “The military will come Charles. Can you save them from the surgeons, scientists, and soldiers if you don’t have confidence in your own worth?”

            “Cain.” It’s a heavy sigh, an acknowledgement of correctness of assumptions.

            “I’m staying.” It’s a decision. “Magneto came to me, asked me to join him. William Stryker was nosing around, had heard rumors about what I did in the war. You, Charles, didn’t ask me for anything. You, I’ll help.”

            “Thank you.” A pause. “So how are you finding students? I know that you can identify _us_ by our minds, but how are you reaching that many minds?”

            “There used to be a machine, but when Shaw attacked the Central Intelligence Agency, the machine was destroyed. So far, people that I had contacted while we still had Cerebro are whom I’ve spoken with, but other than that, no one, other than those who I have been able to find the old fashioned way.”

            “The newspaper?” It had been a game for them, as children, to try and figure out which events in the newspaper could have been caused by some one with a similar power to Raven or Charles. There was another way. “What about using water to amplify your abilities?”

            “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.” The man in the doorway was tall, broad, blue, and a bit furry. His feet were gripping the floor; the dress pants that he wore looked to be Grandfather Francis’ clothes from years before. There were some things helpful in having multiple wings, each with their own attics. There was always something for someone to wear, should they need it, and that something was usually quite helpful in case of an emergency. “How would water amplify Charles’ abilities?”

            “Hank McCoy, my step brother Cain Marko. Cain, Hank here is a graduate student at Columbia in engineering. He built the machine that enhanced my brainwaves, allowing me to find mutants across the country.”

            “When we were young, Mister McCoy,” The man is smiling at him, the glasses an incongruity on the blue face, but apparently his mutation did not enhance his eyesight. “Charles hated bath time. Not because of any of the usual silly reasons that a child usually has, but because the water seemed to capture the brainwaves of everyone, and concentrated them. It was as if the water was the lightening rod for every thought. He would come out of the bath screaming every time.”

            “Is that why you had me rig the shower in your bedroom?” Hank asked Charles, and received a nod in return. “Remarkable. Perhaps it has to do with the transmission of electricity by water. Brainwaves would then also have an electric current, meaning that your ability to read minds has to do with electric fields,” Cain listened at the beginning of a ramble, bemused. Hank and Charles must be quite a sight together, speaking on the intricacies of science. “I wonder if that means that you could read machines kept running with electricity?” Cain remembered the blond woman who had taken his virginity, her interest in Charles, in what he could do, and how he had told her so much, but not that.

            “They would most likely be rather boring to read.” Charles’ exchanged a glance with Cain, and Cain realized that his brother had already done so.  “What my brother is wondering is if we could amplify my skills with a water tank.”

            “Saline, perhaps. That summer we went to the seaside when Father and Sharon went to the Hamptons for Father’s attempts at social climbing, you had a fit in the ocean.” He also remembered the tanks full of precognitives, one of them with familiar blue eyes.

            “I think that would certainly help.” Hank was nodding, jotting down notes on a notebook pulled out of a pocket with a pen dwarfed in a large blue hand. “Oh, Alex called from the pub. He thinks that he’s found a family member of someone who used to work here who would be perfect for housework.”

            “Oh?”

 _XI._

“Captain Stryker, I would like you to track down Cain Marko.” It was Emma Frost’s voice, hidden away in a room that attracted Raven. Mystique, now, but she had been Raven when Charles had taught her that voices that were trying to be overly quiet, secretive, were something to worry about. Charles had also taught her how to recognize the ways of a telepath trying to hide a conversation by convincing those around her or him to forget them, forget their existence and their place. It was an affront to her, a scrape of hidden self that made her hair lift, and her eyes yellow. Azazel is there next to her, his tail lengthening through the hallway, and she reaches out, grabs around his wrist, and concentrates.

 _Listen!_ She sends, and she can feel the creak of the muscles. She is used to the reciprocity of her brother’s telepathy, not the faded imitation that rests in her head and allows her this curiosity, this ability.

 _I did not know that you could speak through minds._ Azazel answers, but he’s creeping closer, ear practically twitching. He’s passive, allowing her brother’s mind to capture the information in his mind. They will not rouse the beast, but still, better to be silent.

“Why?” They can hear it, Emma’s voice cajoling, explaining, _convincing_ the man on the phone. “He is a mutant, one who has refused to work with your organization, which as a patriot, as a soldier, he should do. My contacts tell me that after your men contacted him, he left Long Island, his home for years, and left quickly. He is not the danger, but his loyalties may be. My husband Sebastian and I used to move in the same social circles in New York as he did. He, his Father, Kurt Marko, and his step brother, Charles Xavier.” Azazel’s eyes are widening. “Yes, that Charles Xavier. The man used to work  for our government, but left under such interesting circumstances. Aren’t they still interested in what he did in regards to the problem in Cuba, William?”

“Yes, I’m aware he is a telepath. Did not the Israeli government confirm that for you, William? My husband’s contacts in the State Department told me that he’s still entertaining offers from them yearly. An American citizen who lived abroad for years, worked for foreign governments, William, and a mutant. He has to be a threat to us humans, and powerful, too, for the Israelis to use him, and this is proof that the Israelis have a paranormal program.”

 _Azazel, isn’t William Stryker the man that we’ve been told is doing mutant experimentation?_ Azazel is nodding at her. _We need to get to Magneto. I don’t think that Emma is supposed to be doing this._

 _Hello, children._ Her voice danced through their minds like an icy sheet of wind chimes. _I didn’t know that Charles could do this…_ Raven could feel the diamond dagger tips pulling along the edges of her minds as Azazel steps forward, wrapping his arms around her. As they blast away to the restaurant where Riptide and Erik are having lunch, Emma’s voice lingers in her ears. _You should not have heard that._

 _XII._

            A telepath! William couldn’t believe it. And if the rumors that his assistants and scientists had found, Charles Francis Xavier was a strong telepath. Strong enough to bend minds to his will, or subtly persuade, hide his changes under the veil of another finding.

            “ _Mutation took us from single cells organisms to being the dominant form of reproductive life on this planet. Infinite forms of variation with each generation, all through mutation.”_ He even flaunted it, taking a Doctorate in the studies of genetics. His wife had several of his papers, and he had asked Marcy about them. Well researched, well written. The man was a rising star, probably rising on the wings of his mutation, stealing his words and sources from other scientists with normal lives, normal talents.

            Across the room, Damien shuddered, his eyes starting to blaze, and he calls on him.

            “Damien.” Colonel Michael Damien chafed at being under the command of a Captain, and Army Medical at that, but his superiors had seen fit to assign him here, so there must be a relevant reason for this problem. “I want you and Gutierriez, Drouillard as well, to write up a plan of attack. I have an address, 1407 Greymalkin Lane, Salem Center, Westchester, New York. There will be mutants there, of varying powers, including the target known as Juggernaut.”

            The target known as Juggernaut. Michael Damien had fought with the man in the war, and the man, if aggressive, had been in the least, honorable. Always showing pictures of his brother and sister, Charles and Raven, who looked more like a pair of sisters than brother and sister. He’d mentioned it once, earned himself a slug in the jaw for his words. _“My brother has been hurt enough. Forget him.”_ It had earned him the memory of Charles Marko, darling baby brother, always protected by Cain, and victim of some unknown torture. “What do you want us to do then?”

            Three photos were placed on the board, blown large enough that he and his men could see the faces as if they were sitting underneath the blackboard. A pile of file folders were handed out, one to each team leader. “I want you to capture Charles Xavier, alive.  I need him alive so we can figure out how to keep America safe from these freaks.”

            The hatred ran rampant through the room, tingling down spines. The photo on the board was familiar, the brother that Cain Marko had adored and protected. “Sir, you know that Juggernaut is the brother of the target?” Damien knew the man. “He will not react well to men trying to take his brother, Captain.”

            “He’s just a mutant.” The man was sneering, and Damien wondered for a second if Stryker even bothered to read the mission statistics that he and his staff put together for his command. Juggernaut was impossible to stop once he started moving, and impervious to physical damage both once he stood still and when he moved. These were traits that he remembered manifesting, when the man was in the military. 

            “What do we need to know about the telepath?” It was a valid question, and Gutierriez asked it. “What are the man’s skills?”

            “He was the man that convinced a Russian comrade to fire at the cargo ship that was about to break the line in Cuba, back in September. He’s strong, strong enough to make you do what he wants. If any of you go against mission parameters, you are hereby authorized to eliminate the man that breaks command.”

            “Sir?”

            “We have no way to keep any of you clean of the influences of a telepath, other than the death of the influenced, men. Shoot to kill, anyone except the telepath. I want the telepath alive.”

            As they filed out of the room to create their plan of attack, William Stryker was humming, reading the freak’s thesis, sent from the Columbia Academic Library. Damien couldn’t control his shudder. Stryker might be his commanding officer, but he freaked Damien out.

 

 _XIII._

They came to a mansion that looked abandoned. Blood smeared on the floor, there were the corpses of soldiers littering the marble floors. Most disturbed was the library. Ascending through the room, room that a crackling fire had warmed on chilly nights, a game of chess surrounded by books was devastating. The chess set was sprawled on the ground, and Erik took off his helmet, stepping into the air. Behind him, Mystique was on the lift, taking it up and up. “Grandfather Francis’ office was off the second floor. Charles took over his father’s study years ago, but Grandfather’s study has a view of the grounds, and Charles used to talk of using it when Grandfather had just died. We loved to play hide and seek up there.”

It was a room of wreckage. The furniture, built out of wrecked timber from the Civil War had been a gift from Francis’ first wife. “Charles was here.” Indeed, a copy of the Once and Future King  was sprawled open on the desk.  There were bullets in the floor, and he wondered for a moment how that had happened.

“I had wondered if Charles would ever master that part of his mutation.” A sharp glance at Mystique had her explaining. “Charles’ bedroom would shake when he had nightmares. Shake like the metal in your bedroom melts. I cannot count the times that I have woken him out of them.”

“Why would they have been able to follow Juggernaut here, anyway?”

“Juggernaut is our brother.” Mystique explained. “Cain’s father married Sharon, Charles’ mother. We were all raised here, so Cain would know how to get here. If he was worried about Charles’ safety, he would have come.”

“The bullets?”

“Charles’ deflected them with his mind.” Simple words that he could barely believe. “Erik, all of this blood, the dead soldiers, the damage from Alex’s beams. Where are they? The soldiers should have gotten at least one of the boys, and they wouldn’t take the corpses, would they?”

“They would have taken the corpses with them.” Erik points out. “Emma is working with a man who experiments on mutants. The dead children would have been new experiments to look at.”  He was seeing it, though. There was both too much blood and too little. They hadn’t died, and they had fought back, but some of the damage looked as if it was gratuitous, the damage of a victory untouched, anger channeled into destruction. “You’re right.”

A voice whispered across his mind. _Erik._ His eyes were scanning the room now, and Raven was with him. “Erik, would they have left if they couldn’t find anyone?”

“Maybe.” Azazel and Riptide joined them. “I think they may have left another way, though. Could your brother compel them to leave?”

“Certainly.” _In a time of panic, certainly! Charles?_ She asked the room, the building, tugging on the lines of her mind. _Where are you?_

 _Panic room. Hank and I were working on using a tank of saline solution to expand my powers, and we had decided to put it in the panic room, access to a solitary well, and all. I was in the sitting room with Scott and Mrs. Winters, talking about his education, and the military came. Havok got Diana to safety._ Diana/empath/teacher flashed through her mind, a smiling face with a kind touch, looking down towards him. _Hank got Scott, his mother, and I into the panic room. And then I convinced them to leave._

“There’s a room.” She walked behind the desk, pressing at the marble carvings, letting it slide away, opening up the door beneath. A squat to the appropriate level allowed her to spin the dial, opening the door.  “They are through here.” Magneto ducked into the room behind her, barely able to stand as he walked through the passage and into the room in the middle, a room surrounded by people that seemed to soar up out of concrete.

And in the middle of the room is a marble pool, deep enough to look akin to a pool, and Magneto could hear Raven’s cry of distress. “Charles hates the water.”

 _I’m fine._ His voice floats through their heads. _William Stryker. Anonymity was our first line of defense, and Emma Frost stripped that from me. I pulled it from her head._

 _She wanted a war._ There was a body, Banshee, stepping in front of Scott and Scott’s mother, taking a bullet in the chest. _She pushed the wrong telepath._


End file.
